8 July 2017

The Two Jakes: Take 2

"Paramount will make this movie," said one observer. "But only when the movie makers get their act together."- Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1985

Following
the very public collapse of the initial production of The Two
Jakes in May of 1985, the
sets were dismantled, a number of claims were filed by crew members
regarding unpaid work, and the production faced lawsuits from Laird
International Studios, Kodak and others. Paramount announced that the
production had been postponed indefinitely, although Frank Mancuso,
the executive producer, did state that he hadn't given up hope of
resurrecting it.The
rumour mill continued to grind about what exactly was going on -
largely that other studios had made offers to Paramount to take over
the troubled production, and that Robert Towne was in negotiations to
sell his screenplay for $2 million, in order to help meet the unpaid
crew salaries. There were also some very unlikely claims that Robert
Evans had somehow scraped together $25 million in independent
financing to make the film free of studio interference.One
report quoted Alan Ladd Jr., the chairman of MGM/UA, as saying that
he and his firm had made an offer to Paramount, but that they hadn't
"told us yes or no". The report even went so far as to say
that MGM wouldn't insist on Evans remaining behind the camera.However,
on May 31, Daily Variety reported that Ladd categorically
denied that any such offer had been made, as did Jack Nicholson's
attorney. Robert Evans' attorney, Alan Schwartz, issued a
non-committal response, claiming that Evans was, for legal reasons,
"under wraps" and not at liberty to discuss such matters.
Robert Towne 'disavowed knowledge of any active negotiations going on
"with anybody anywhere"'.

Towne,
Evans and Nicholson, of TEN Productions, headed their separate ways.
Jack Nicholson went straight onto Heartburn with director Mike
Nichols, replacing Mandy Patinkin as the lead actor, who Nichols
decided wasn't working out after two days of shooting.

Robert
Evans went back to desperately trying to revive his career with the
ongoing investigation of the murder of Roy Radin hanging over his
head, although it was yet to hit the headlines the way it would three
and a half years later.

Robert
Towne, however, wasn't done with The Two Jakes just yet. As
David Thomson reported in Vanity Fair, he was heard "muttering
about disloyalty, lawsuits, his resolve to set the picture up
somewhere else, and how 'this time they aren't going to fuck the
goose that lays the golden egg.'"

In August 1985 it emerged that he was in negotiations for producer
Dino De Laurentiis to acquire the production from Paramount and
reinstate Towne as director.There
were, of course, a few catches. Paramount owned the rights to
Chinatown and the Jake Gittes character, so this film couldn't
be identified as a sequel, or have any connection to Chinatown.
As a result, the script would require some major rewriting, the title
would have to be changed, and with Evans out as producer, Nicholson
wouldn't be involved, so the lead character would have to be recast.More
importantly, there was the question of how much Paramount Pictures,
which had already lost something in the neighbourhood of $4 million
already on the aborted production, would demand to take the picture
out of 'turnaround' (a situation where a halted film production is
written off as a loss by a production company, but can still be sold
to another, to recoup development costs).

Harrison Ford in Witness (1985)

Towne
was determined to resurrect the film, so he pursued the possibility
regardless. Harrison Ford was widely reported to have read the script
and showed interest in replacing Nicholson as the lead. Roy Scheider
was brought up again in connection with the Jake Berman role, as was
Dustin Hoffman. Cathy Moriarty, who was to have played Lillian Bodine
in the original production, was apparently going to return. A start
date of July 1986 was even mentioned.Once
again, it wasn't to be. Negotiations continued into mid-September,
but according to Towne, Paramount and others were demanding a
"prohibitive" amount for turnaround, so the film's budget
would have ballooned to at least $25 million. De Laurenttiis passed.

And
still, The Two Jakes refused to die. Despite what appeared to
be insurmountable hurdles blocking its progress, Nicholson and Evans
insisted that the picture was not dead, telling Variety in
December 1985 that at one point they had gone so far as to consider
shooting the film in Paris, in order to have Roman Polanski in the
director's chair.

Comedian
Whoopi Goldberg made a somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggestion in late
1985, telling reporters she'd like to play "a male private
detective" opposite Jack Nicholson in the film in the role
originally intended for Robert Evans (either Goldberg or the
reporters must have gotten their wires crossed at some point - Jake
Berman wasn't a detective). She was simply making a point - that she
had as much right as anyone else to be considered for all the major
Hollywood roles.However,
Evans replied with "That's so ludicrous it's a joke. It's like
saying I'm going to play the life of Libby Holman. If anyone is going
to play that role, I'm going to play it, and if I don't, I'll
choose who I wish to have in the role. And Whoopi Goldberg would not
be my first choice."(Goldberg
was later quoted in 1991 as saying that she had found Evans' response
mean and hurtful)Apart
from the likelihood that Evans had lost his sense of humour after all
his recent troubles, his comments also indicate that not only hadn't
he given up on producing The Two Jakes, he hadn't completely
abandoned the idea of playing Jake Berman himself.

1986 saw
yet another attempt at reviving The Two Jakes- this time with the Cannon Group, a production company best
known for such exploitation fare as The Happy Hooker,
Missing in Action, The Delta Force
andEnter the Ninja. In April, Daily Variety
announced that the picture was back on at Cannon for a 1987 shoot,
with Evans, Nicholson and Towne together again as producer, star and
director. It was later reported that Evans had finally decided not to
play the second Jake, and Roy Scheider was, once again, cited as a
likely candidate for the role.What
Evans wasn't prepared to relinquish, however, was his role as the
producer of the film - but Cannon's owners, Menahem Golan and Yoram
Globus, had other plans. They offered to buy his stake in the film
and give him a nominal credit as line producer. Evans wasn't
interested in anything but full control, telling Variety in
May that "the picture doesn't get made without me", and so
negotiations fell apart by the end of the year.

Robert Towne directing Mel Gibson

1987
brought with it a few ups and downs. Robert Towne managed to get his
act together, with Warner Bros picking up his script Tequila
Sunrise, which he would also direct the following year. Released
in 1988, the film was a commercial success, starring Mel Gibson,
Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell (and also featuring a brief cameo
from Bud Boetticher, who was to have played the villain, Earl Rawley,
in The Two Jakes back in 1985).Jack
Nicholson's acting career continued to sail along, with The
Witches of Eastwick being a solid hit, and Ironweed
receiving rave reviews and earning Jack yet another Academy Award
nomination.

Robert
Evans, however, continued his downward slide. 1987 was Paramount
Pictures' seventy-fifth anniversary, but such was Evans' infamy by
then that, despite having been instrumental in saving the studio
nearly twenty years earlier, he wasn't asked to appear in the
anniversary photo featuring the studio's most
famous stars, directors, producers and studio chiefs. No one wanted
to do business with him, and not long after, he was asked to vacate
his offices at Paramount.

He did
finally manage to produce a film that year, though, if you can call
it that - The Power of Faith, a 42-minute video documentary
about Pope John Paul II, which he said he hoped would "be the highlight of my professional career". The hyperbolic blurb on the back cover might well have been written by Evans himself:

Robert Evans has created an extraordinary first in motion pictures. A vision so powerful it transcends the dimensions of language... the dimensions of words themselves. THE POWER OF FAITH is a story of humanity and forgiveness that narration, for in its purity and truth it reaches through the universal window of all people... the soul...

Meanwhile,
The Two Jakes remained in limbo. One would think the smart
thing to have done would be to simply abandon it altogether, but the
lawsuits levelled against TEN and Paramount prevented this from
happening, along with the $4 million that TEN owed Paramount for the
aborted 1985 attempt.After
the failures to revive the film with De Laurentiis and Cannon, it
became obvious to all concerned that the only way it could ever get
made was back where it started, at Paramount.

In
September of 1988, Jack Nicholson began negotiations with Paramount's
Frank Mancuso Jr, who owed him a favour for rescuing Heartburn
at a moment's notice. Nicholson's determination to bring The
Two Jakes to the screen wasn't
entirely driven by a
burning artistic desire, however. In a 1989 interview with The
New York Times,
he reveals a far less romantic motivation:

I
was the only person who had any money, so the lawsuits went after me.
It bored me to death. When I work, I don't just step in and learn my
lines. I have to plan a year in advance. And I had to work my
schedule around the lawsuits.

Exactly
how the legal and financial complications were finally untangled is
unknown, as the details of the settlement are sealed, and all parties
involved remain legally bound not to discuss it. Nevertheless, the
three partners who had formed TEN Productions managed to come to an
agreement with Paramount, and in
October 1988, Variety
announced that the picture was officially back on, starring Jack
Nicholson and, you guessed it, Roy Scheider.

There
were to be a few changes, not the least of which was the director.
Since the 1985 collapse, Nicholson and Evans had pursued several
alternatives, including Mike Nichols, Bernardo Bertolucci and even,
somehow, getting Roman Polanski back from Paris. Nichols and
Bertolucci, unfortunately, would have pushed the film's budget too
high, and the Polanski option wasn't feasible, if it was ever
considered seriously in the first place.1(Towne,
presumably, wasn't in the running any more, even if he was still
interested)

According
to Peter Biskind's Easy
Riders, Raging Bulls,
Nicholson's friend and colleague from the BBS era, producer Bert
Schneider, was listening to Jack one night "bemoaning the fact
that he would never be taken seriously as a director", and
suggested that he revive The
Two Jakes and
direct it himself, with Schneider on board as executive producer to
watch his back. Bert's career had foundered since the glory days of
BBS in the 1970s - after the company dissolved in 1975, he had
produced Terence Malick's widely acclaimed Days
of Heaven
(1978), but since then, his only film had been Broken
English in 1981,
which was never released outside of the festival circuit.Paramount
wasn't interested in bringing Schneider along, and Nicholson didn't
push for his involvement any further, ending their twenty-five year
friendship. (Biskind doesn't specify exactly when this took place -
most likely sometime around 1987/1988, after Nichols and Bertolucci
had turned the project down)According
to Nicholson, the initial idea of him directing the film actually
came from Evans and Towne, who suggested he take over as director and
fire them both. "That was one thing I wasn't prepared for,"
he said to the LA Times in 1990. He would reiterate this
reluctance in Jack on Jakes, a featurette included on the 2007
DVD release of The Two Jakes:

I basically directed the
film because it was the only way to not have it be this ongoing
drama. So there was always that element to actually doing the
picture. I wasn't dying to direct it, I mean, I knew the problems.

However,
or whenever, he got the idea, Jack Nicholson emerged from his
negotiations with Mancuso in 1988 as the new director of The
Two Jakes,
despite having sworn never to direct a film again, after the
difficult experience of Goin'
South in 1978.

According
to a December 1989 article in Los
Angeles Magazine,
Robert Towne sold the rights to his script to Paramount for $1.5
million and remained the credited writer, although Nicholson insisted
on significant rewrites.

Robert
Evans was still, officially, the producer of the film, but the
production company was no longer TEN, it was now the 88 Production
Company, an entity co-owned by Paramount, with control over all the
finances and distribution. With Evans' personal life in complete
turmoil and his professional abilities in question, Harold Schneider
was hired as line producer to handle the budget and keep an eye on
the day-to-day production. Evans is the first to admit that he was
the producer in name only, more of a hindrance than a contributor,
his very involvement almost entirely thanks to Nicholson's loyalty.
"I was a vegetable at the time," he told Movieline
in 1993. He credits Schneider as being the true producer of the film,
and insisted on him receiving full credits as co-producer and as
presenter.

Nicholson & DOP Vilmos Zsigmond

When
it came to putting the cast and crew together, the team from 1985 was
largely replaced. Many weren't available, or simply weren't
interested, having been burned the first time around. Keeping the
budget down was also a strong factor.

Production
designer Dick Sylbert was replaced by a newcomer to the business,
architect Jeremy Railton, Vilmos Zsigmond took over as director of
photography from Caleb Deschanel, and composing duties went from
Jerry Goldsmith to Van Dyke Parks, a friend of Nicholson's.

James Hong & Jack Nicholson

With
the exception of Nicholson as Gittes, Perry Lopez as Lou Escobar and
James Hong as Khan (Evelyn Mulwray's butler), the film was almost
entirely recast, and partly rewritten in a couple of cases to
accomodate the circumstances.

Madeline Stowe & Meg Tilly

The two lead female roles of Kitty
Berman and Lillian Bodine were now to be played by Meg Tilly and
Madeline Stowe. Richard Farnsworth replaced Bud Boetticher as the
villain, Earl Rawley. Musician Rubén
Blades came on board as the hoodlum Mickey Nice. Eli Wallach and
Frederic Forrest were cast in roles (Cotton Weinberger and Chuck
Newty) which were, reportedly, originally to be filled by Dennis
Hopper and Joe Pesci.

Richard Farnsworth, Frederic Forrest & Jack Nicholson

David Keith & Perry Lopez

In Towne's first and second
drafts of The Two
Jakes, Detective
Loach (the officer who shot Evelyn Mulwray at the end of Chinatown)
plays a crucial part. Richard Bakalayan, who played Loach in
Chinatown,
wasn't available, so rather than cast a different actor in the role,
the character was rewritten as Loach's son, and played by David
Keith.

Joe Mantell

Similarly, Towne's early drafts
of Jakes
include one of Gittes' associates from Chinatown, Pat Duffy (originally played by Bruce
Glover). Glover also wasn't available, so the character
was changed to Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell) - Jake's offsider in
Chinatown
who delivers the
film's
devastating final line.

Nicholson & Evans as the two Jakes in 1985

As for the second Jake of the
title, it goes without saying that no one was under the illusion by
this stage that Robert Evans could have another stab at it, least of
all Evans himself. "In retrospect, I should have stepped aside
four years ago, but I was too angry," he told the New York
Times in 1989. Despite having been repeatedly associated with the
part since 1985, it seems Roy Scheider was unavailable, or just
unwilling to fill the role. Dustin Hoffman (who had been the original
choice as early as 1976), hot off the success of his
Academy-Award-winning performance in Rain Man, was well out of
the film's price range, and likely not interested in playing second
fiddle to Nicholson.

Harvey Keitel & Jack Nicholson as Berman & Gittes

Instead, it was announced in
March 1989 that Jake Berman was to be played by Harvey Keitel, who
had originally been cast as Mickey Nice in 1985. In Jack on Jakes,
Jack Nicholson describes, vaguely, how Keitel was cast:

Anyway, I was a big fan
of Harvey's, and you know, we talked, and at the end of this he just
grabbed me by the shoulders and he said 'Jack, do you want me to play
this part or not?', you know, and I said, 'Well, yeah, I do,' so
that's how Harvey was cast.

One gets the impression that
Keitel landed the role simply because there wasn't anyone else of his
acting calibre that the production could afford, and just happened to
be available (this was a couple of years before he finally entered
the mainstream, with standout turns in Thelma & Louise,
Bugsy, and Reservoir Dogs). Despite delivering a solid
performance as Jake Berman in the finished film, the gritty,
down-to-earth Harvey Keitel seems miscast, not being quite able to
conjure up the slimy charm required for the character.

Tom Waits & Rubén
Blades

Nicholson filled the rest of
the cast and crew with friends and even family, hiring his daughter,
Jennifer, as a production-design assistant. Much of the crew had
worked with him on Goin'
South, or on
films he'd appeared in. Many small parts went to actors he'd known
for thirty years, from acting classes with Jeff Corey. Tracey Walter,
who plays Tyrone Otley in Jakes
(better
known as the Joker's sidekick, Bob, in Batman)
said, "He doesn't forget the guys he knew before he was famous."
Van Dyke Parks, who scored Goin'
South for
Nicholson in 1978, and was now on board to compose the score for
Jakes,
also appears in the film as the prosecuting attorney. Alan
Finkelstein, associate producer of the film, was Jack's new golf
partner and an old friend. Tom Waits has a brief cameo as a police
detective.

With
shooting planned to start in April, Towne and Nicholson began work on
the much-needed rewrite of the script in January 1989. Unfortunately,
by all accounts it seems that Towne's input at the time could be
summed up by one of Chinatown's
most famous lines - "as little as possible." He worked on
the revisions for six months, then promptly left, leaving Nicholson
with the task of fixing a still problematic script while shooting the
film.Nicholson
has been relatively taciturn about the matter, except to say in a
1997 interview that "once I got the assignment nothing went
wrong other than everybody on the project being very upset with
Robert Towne." In Jack on Jakes, he mentions the
difficulties almost in passing:

During
this time from when we started knowing I would direct it, I think I
did Batman in London, you know, was meant to have a final
script before I started - didn't - was assured I'd have it by the
time I got back - didn't - and so it was hard to get the script.

Others didn't hold back - in a 1989 article in Los Angeles Magazine,
Harold Schneider accused Towne of having abandoned Nicholson, and Anne
Goursaud, the editor of the film, agreed that 'abandoned' is exactly how
Jack felt. One close associate of Nicholson's was quoted in the article
as saying:

(Towne) has been disappointing to us. Let's just say
that maybe sometimes it's like he didn't want the job to succeed. You
can say that Jack has suffered. This has been a movie of lost
relationships for him on the personal side.

Robert
Evans sums up Towne's eventual contribution in The
Kid Stays in the Picture:

Alan
Finkelstein, a producer on the film, specifically remembers that not
only did Robert Towne not deliver a completed script, but went to
Bora Bora with his wife, claiming he would complete the remaining 20
percent from there. The only line of communication with Towne was to
call the main hut between certain hours of the day. The “staff”
would then try to locate him because Towne’s hut had no direct
phone line. That was the last we ever heard from Robert Towne. What a
friend.

Working
with Tom Cruise on Days
of Thunder by
then, beginning a close working collaboration which would continue
well into the next decade, Towne's response in a 1990 Premiere
article almost suggests that he couldn't be bothered denying
anything, that he was sick of the whole affair. "As far as Jack
and I are concerned, I can only say that I did the best that I
could." As to whether his absence hurt the film itself, he
virtually washes his hands of it:

I mean, why don't
they just let you look at the movie and decide on that? If the movie
is good, no amount of discussion of my shortcomings is going to hurt
it, and if the movie is bad, no amount of that is going to help it.

Meanwhile,
the other Bob had far more serious problems to deal with. In October
1988, five-and-a-half years after the bullet-riddled corpse of Roy
Radin was discovered in a remote Los Angeles canyon, police had
formally charged four people with his murder, and the case hit the
headlines with full force, with Robert Evans' alleged involvement a
major talking point. Evans was not charged, nor named as a suspect,
but the District Attorney's Office refused to rule him out as a
suspect, and he was subpoenaed to testify at a preliminary hearing on
May 12, 1989. Following the advice of his attorney, Robert Shapiro,
Evans exercised his constitutional right against self-incrimination
under the Fifth Amendment, and refused to answer any questions.Although
his role in the case officially ended that day (he would eventually
be cleared of any involvement in 1991), the press continued to milk
his association with it for all it was worth, and taking the Fifth
had just added fuel to the fire.

Robert
Evans had finally hit rock bottom. Three months earlier, he had been
forced to sell his beloved Woodland mansion to meet his debts, and
was paying $25,000 a month, which he couldn't even closely afford, to
live there as a tenant. Now his name was being dragged through the
mud by the media at every opportunity. On
May 19, fearing suicide, he checked himself into the mental health
ward of Scripps Memorial Hospital in San Diego. Locked behind bars,
pumped full of sedatives and facing the possibility of electroshock
therapy, he immediately regretted the decision and managed to arrange
an escape back home two days later.

Principal
photography on The
Two Jakes began on April 18, 1989. Despite the four years of troubles that had
preceded it, the shoot went smoothly enough, coming in on schedule
and on budget, although it wasn't immune to the usual problems faced
by any film production, with the 1940s setting creating its own set
of difficulties when shooting on location in Los Angeles of 1989.
When the production arrived at the building to be used as Gittes'
office building (selected by Dick Sylbert for the 1985 shoot), they
discovered that several rows of trees on either side had since been
cut down, revealing a huge modern post office and supermarket.
Similarly, an orange grove that had been scouted as a location had
also been cut down. On one remote location shoot, it turned out that
an actor hadn't been cast for the scene due to be shot. And although
only the most eagle-eyed viewers ever spotted it, an ATM can even be
glimpsed in the background of one shot:

In
various interviews at the time, Nicholson was very upbeat, while
making no secret of how exhausting the experience was:

You
got any idea what it's like to direct a movie and star in it, too?
I'll tell ya. You're up at six and on the set at eight. You shoot all
morning - settin' up shots, directin' the actors, playin' your own
part all at the same time. Then you miss lunch 'cause you're
thrashin' out production problems. In the afternoon you shoot till
dark. The actors go home - you don't. You got two hours of
conferences before
you look at what you shot the day before. Suddenly it's midnight, and
you haven't had supper.So
you go eat, and if you manage to get home by two a.m. you're lucky.
You're dead beat, but you can't go to bed yet. You're also an actor.
You got to study your lines for the next day. So you put out the
lights at three, and three hours later the alarm goes off. That's the
normal routine. However, Bob Towne and I had to rewrite the
script while we were shootin', and the only time I could write
was in the wee hours. So for about three months I got one, two hours
of sleep a night.I
used to laugh at Stallone. Now I admire him. The Two Jakes is
the hardest work I've ever done. The whole experience was a specific
test of my character.-
Life Magazine, September 1990

At
the same time, he seemed to relish having returned to the role of
director. Journalists visiting the set would report a generally
easy-going, relaxed environment, with a cheerful Nicholson in full
control, enthusiastic about the project and more than happy to
discuss virtually any aspect of the story he was trying to tell.

Not
that he wasn't prepared to crack the whip when he needed to. In a
1989 New York Times article, Nicholson is described dealing
with an actor (unnamed, although vaguely identified as playing a
policeman) who simply isn't giving him what he wants:

With
a flick of his voice, Mr Nicholson can turn boiling water into ice
cubes in midair. He has not unleashed his anger yet, but everyone -
actors and technicians - seems clumsy in anticipation."I'm
doing my best, Jack." the actor whines.Mr
Nicholson's answer is in a razor-sharp monotone. "We're on take
24, and you haven't said the lines right yet. I know you're trying to
get it right. So are 130 other people."

In
Jack on Jakes, Nicholson describes how, one day, he went
berserk at Perry Lopez for drifting into frame, only to feel terrible
about it immediately afterwards. After apologising to everyone for
hours, he vowed to himself not to yell on set again.

And
I didn't, you know, for a day or so, and finally this great gaffer,
Gavin, calls me aside - yeah, what is it? He says, "Look, you've got
to start yelling again." "What do you mean?" He says, "You're so
quiet, it's making the crew uptight! We're walking around on
eggshells, you've got to get back to just hurling yourself about."

Through
it all, Nicholson's loyalty to Evans never wavered. Undeterred by the
notoriety generated by the producer's alleged connection to the
'Cotton Club Murder', he made sure that Evans was on set for the
first day of shooting. Even more selflessly, he insisted that each
day, the dailies were shown in the projection room of Evans' Woodland
home, rather than at the studio. As Evans puts it:

Strange,
here’s a guy directing and starring, knowing that showing the
dailies at my home would cost him a much needed two hours’ sleep.
But it mattered little. He knew by doing that it gave me a much
needed legitimacy. Not quite understanding why they had to be there,
each night the entire crew would meet at my home to watch dailies.
The Irishman made it clear why; he needed my approving eye (even
knowing full well not only couldn’t I see straight, but I was on
the verge of a breakdown).

The
principal shoot wrapped on July 26, with a scene shot at Jack
Nicholson's own home, but it was not until October that shooting was
fully completed.

With
Robert Towne AWOL, Nicholson had made numerous changes to the script,
including jettisoning the majority of an elaborate flashback/dream sequence. Several
voiceovers from Gittes were also added, "less to propel
narrative than to establish a unifying voice and tone",
according to Nicholson.

The
most significant change, however, must have felt like a particularly
bitter dose of deja vu for Robert Towne - his ending was completely
changed, just as it had been on Chinatown. Towne's drafts
ended with Jake Gittes and Kitty Berman parting ways, then a
reference to the freak Los Angeles snowstorm that actually occurred
in January of 1949:

GITTES- when'll you come back?

KITTY(glancing about) Oh... first snow on the ground.GITTESYou know the last time it snowed in L.A.?

KITTYNo, do you?

GITTESThe next time will probably be the first time...

KITTY(nods, then:) Well, it would be nice.

Gittes' face falls. Then his voice and manner brighten.

GITTES

Tell you what. It's almost Thanksgiving. I'll see if I can't arrange something by the first of the year.

He winks and gives here a quick kiss on the cheek, gets in his car and drives off. Kitty watches him go. A little dust rises from the gravel and

DISSOLVE TO:

SNOW FALLING

over a still photo of the LOS ANGELES TIMES and its huge headline:

WIND-DRIVEN SNOW, HAIL, SLEET INVADE SOUTHLAND IN JANUARY STORM

The headline DISSOLVES into the streets of L.A. from Cahuengha to La Brea, from Mulholland to City Hall, filled with falling snow, and occasional pedestrians filled with joy at finding themselves in it, and occasionally finding each other.

THE END

According
to a number of sources, this scene was filmed, but Nicholson felt it
was too sentimental, so he wrote and shot a simpler, more
bittersweet, and somewhat open-ended final scene in Gittes' office,
with Gittes telling Kitty that "it (the past) never goes away."

Originally
scheduled for a Christmas 1989 release, it soon became clear in
post-production that The Two Jakes was not going to be an easy
film to put together, however well the shoot itself had gone. The
release date was pushed back to March 1990, then August 1990, never a
good sign. Those involved insisted that the delays were merely due to
Nicholson's determination to make the final result as fine a film as
possible, but it was rumoured that preview screenings had not gone
down well,
and that executives were unhappy with the hefty 144-minute running time of
Jack's initial cut (the final film would eventually run 137 minutes).

Jack,daughter Lorraine & Rebecca Broussard

Nicholson
was also dealing with his own set of personal troubles at the time.
His sixteen-year on-off relationship with Anjelica Huston ended for
good in October of 1989 when he confessed to her that Rebecca
Broussard, a young actress he'd been having an affair with for
several years, and who appears in The Two Jakes as Gittes'
secretary, was going to have his child.

Lorraine
Nicholson was born in April 1990, and would feature quite heavily
with Broussard in numerous publicity articles for The Two Jakes,
with Jack as the proud new father.

Karen Mayo-Chandler

The
woes between Nicholson and Huston weren't completely over, though -
the final straw came in December 1989, when Playboy reprinted
a lurid English article from 1988 in which model/actress Karen
Mayo-Chandler, star of such masterpieces as Hamburger:The Motion
Picture and Stripped to Kill II, described various sexual
encounters she'd had with Nicholson, including being spanked with a
Ping-Pong bat.

Enough
was enough. In her memoir, Watch Me, Huston recounts how she
called him, demanding to know where he was. He was heading to work at
Paramount. She went straight over, marched into his office, and
proceeded to "beat the living hell out of him."

The
Two Jakes was finally released
in the United States on August 10, 1990, and disappeared quickly from screens. Despite Jack Nicholson having being propelled into
full-blown mega-stardom the year before, with his movie-stealing
performance as the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman,
it wasn't enough to save The Two Jakes
from box-office failure. The film only grossed $10 million, just over
half of its estimated $19 million budget.2

A mere four days after its release, an article in the Los Angeles Times declared it a flop, blaming its failure upon the film relying too heavily on its "long-ago Chinatown roots", or skewing "beyond the range of audiences too young to care about private eye Jake Gittes."The article also pointed towards Paramount's promotion of the film leaning too heavily upon the presence of Jack Nicholson, rather than the story, along with an emphasis upon elements that might sell well, but weren't really a part of the movie itself - the official tagline of the film, which appeared on a number of posters, was, "They say money makes the world go round. But sex was invented before money."Also typical of the rather muddled advertising campaign is this TV spot, which, while sounding quite cute with Nicholson's voiceover, doesn't fit was meant to be a rather thoughtful, bittersweet film:

Reviews
were mixed, at best. While it received some praise from such notable
critics as Rogert Ebert, Charles Champlin and Vincent Canby, the
overall view of the film was that while it wasn't a complete
disaster, and contained some excellent performances, it didn't come
close to its classic predecessor, was too slow and confusing, and
sorely missed having Roman Polanski at the helm, with Nicholson only
"a competent but not exciting director", as Canby put it.

Even
many of those close to the production were less than enthusiastic.
Robert Towne all but disowned the film, and hasn't ever publicly
ventured any opinion about the finished product itself, generally
deflecting any questions. In a 1990 New
York Times
article, all he had to say was:

In the
case of Chinatown, I knew in every respect what the film was
going to be like. I watched the dailies. I fought with Roman every
day and ate dinner with him every night. We even agreed about where
we disagreed. Here I didn't have the same sense. The most truthful
answer is that I don't know how I feel about The Two Jakes.

Robert Evans at the premiere

Robert
Evans had little more to say, laying the blame for the film's failure
squarely at the feet of Robert Towne:

The
picture opened and closed quickly. This was not Nicholson’s fault,
except possibly for his naïveté in expecting the last 20 percent of
the script to be there for him from his old pal Bob 'the Beener'
Towne.

Roman Polanski,
whose absence sometimes seemed to dominate the press about the film,
was very frank with his opinion in a 1991 interview:

Well,
I would never have been a part of [The Two Jakes] because I just
don't believe in sequels, but I must say that I admired the metier of
Jack Nicholson. I think it was a beautifully made picture.
Unfortunately, there are serious problems with the story, as we all
know. The film is extremely difficult to follow. Furthermore, each
time you get hooked on a story and you invest your emotions in some
kind of sequence, it's abruptly cut and switched to something new.
It's jolting. He loses you every few minutes, But the acting, the
camera work, the staging of sequences is quite admirable.

Jack Nicholson at the premiere

Despite
the very flat reception to the film, however, the film has always had
a staunch defender in Jack Nicholson himself. Although he admits that
he largely revived The Two Jakes and took on the role of
director in order to resolve the ongoing issues created by the
breakdown of the 1985 production - "to get it off his
conscience", as Robert Evans puts it - he's said that he was
"delighted" with how the film turned out, and supervised a
number of changes for the 2007 DVD edition, including full colour
correction and the removal of some narration and music cues, along
with appearing in the DVD featurette, Jack on Jakes. He's fond
of quoting the legendary director Billy Wilder, who he screened the
finished film for:

He
said it was a great picture because 90 minutes of it was a detective
following the clues. He said, "Anybody can make 300 Indians attack".

Nicholson
also blames the constant attention given to the off-screen dramas for
ruining any chance of the film being a success:

I've
made three films where you could say, `What went wrong?' And I think
they're all just dandy. The film is what I tried to make. But that
film was destroyed for any public before it even came out because
nobody could shut up about it.

And
so, sixteen years after 'Chinatown II' was first mentioned, the
troubled saga of The Two Jakes came to an end, along with the
long friendships between Robert Towne and two men who had been beside
him almost his entire career. Jack Nicholson, who Towne had first met
thirty years earlier in Jeff Corey's acting class, at which time he'd
told Jack that he'd be a movie star one day, and that he'd write
scripts for him, and Robert Evans, who had helped kick his
screenwriting career into overdrive by producing Chinatown,
and who Towne had referred to in the prologue of the 1983 limited
edition publication of Chinatown's screenplay as "one who
in memory and in life remains a standard for every kind of human
generosity and one I have yet to see matched in this town."

It
would be more than a decade before he would even be on speaking terms
with either of them again.

The
final casualty was the third film in a trilogy following Jake Gittes
and the development of Los Angeles. With so much bad blood having already been spilled, and the second film barely making it to the screen as it was, what was made quite clear at the time was that the story wouldn't be going any further. As
Nicholson told the Los Angeles Times
in August 1990, several days before The
Two Jakes
had even opened, "This is the end of J.J."

Notes1 Samantha
Geimer, the girl at the centre of the Roman Polanski scandal, does
mention in her 2013 autobiograhy, The Girl, that, while
dealing with the civil lawsuit she brought against him in 1988,
Polanski and his lawyers were also attempting to negotiate his
return to the United States.